Date Published: October 17, 2025
Time Published: 11:02 AM
Category: Prose
Theme: The Eyes’ Resistance to Change and Masking, The Eyes’ Honesty
People dye their hair, change their clothes, cover their skin in fabric and ink. They shift their posture, rehearse new laughs, speak in tones that sound nothing like the child they once were. Survival teaches us to become someone else, someone shinier, someone softer or harder, depending on what the world demands. But no matter how well the transformation is worn, the eyes never quite follow.
Eyes don’t learn how to lie the way everything else does. The mouth can twist into polite smiles, lips wrapping around rehearsed sentences. The voice can sound stable. The hands can learn to stop trembling. But the eyes betray all of it. They are the windows we try to shut, the ones no amount of layers can fully shield. They remain untouched by the performance, stubbornly honest, heartbreakingly true.
Every pair of eyes tells a story the mouth couldn’t bear to speak. A flicker of hesitation, a glaze of grief, the ghost of someone they used to love—they live there. The laughter that didn’t reach the soul, the trust that was shattered too young, the apology that was never received. You can find them all in a glance, if you know how to look. It’s in the way someone avoids your gaze when they're breaking inside, or the way their eyes light up for a second too long when someone mentions a name they swore they forgot.
Eyes hold archives. They carry the heaviness of moments lost in silence: the time they sat on the bathroom floor, shaking but quiet, or the memory of a goodbye that felt more like being erased. They remember the innocence that once looked out at the world with wonder before it was dimmed by disappointment. They hold the dreams that still burn quietly, long after they’ve stopped being spoken aloud.
Sometimes, eye contact feels like reading a journal with missing pages. You don’t get the whole story, but you get enough to know something happened—something tender, something sharp. And in those moments, when someone lets you really see them, even for a flicker of time, it feels like the loudest kind of honesty. Because even if their words say they’re fine, their eyes confess something else entirely.
So people may change everything else. They’ll dye their hair, trade their laugh for one that fits the room, cover the skin in ink or long sleeves. But the eyes? The eyes remain. And if you look close enough, you'll see every truth they never dared to say out loud, blinking back at you like a story begging to be heard.
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